Step 4: Downloading a community game

For example purposes, let's download the Chicken Long Jump game. To do this, in the Search text box, enter “Chicken Long Jump” and click the Go button to start the search. Click the link for the first option in the search results as shown below.

Step 4a: The Download prompt

This will take you to the game home page and, after a few seconds, you'll notice a new yellow colored bar at the top of the page that gives you an option to download the game.

Step 4b: Downloading a Game

Click on the link and Popfly Game Downloader will begin downloading the game. You'll be able to see detailed progress information while Popfly Game downloader builds the offline version of the game.

When it's finished downloading, you'll see a notice that the status message changes to Done. You can then click the link to launch a local copy of the game!

Step 5: Run your newly downloaded game

Clicking on the link will open a new browser window to a html file that includes the offline version of the Popfly game.

Step 6: Bulk downloading a user's projects

Another handy feature that you can use to download either all of your shared projects (the project must be set to shared) or all projects built by a specific Popfly user is the Online Bulk Download feature. Switch back to the Popfly Game Downloader and click on the Online Bulk Download tab.

From here, enter the user name of Popfly user who's games you want to download. For example, to download all of the games Adam Nathan built (http://popfly.com/users/adam/), enter “adam” in the download text box and hit enter.

This will start downloading all of the games that Adam has created. You can remove a specific game by clicking the X next to the name of the game.

Viewing the Games You've Downloaded

Once you've finished downloading all of the projects you're interested in, you can see the list of all of the games you've downloaded by switching to the Offline tab Popfly Game Downloader.

Now that you've downloaded the games, if you switch back to the directory that you put the PopflyGameDownloader.exe in, you'll see a folder for each of the games that you downloaded (using the format “PopflyUserName.ProjectName”). 

Inside each directory is the Silverlight application for the game (the .xap file) and an index.html file that hosts the .xap file.

You can now play games like Crayon Cannon to your heart's content

How does it work?

When you click the “download” link, Popfly Game Downloader goes to the game you selected and does a number of things, including:

• It downloads all of the game assets (audio, images, XAML)
• It dynamically builds a .xap file including all of the game assets
• It also removes server-side features like the high-score and achievement services
• Finally, it builds an index.html file to host the Silverlight game

Conclusion

While it's sad that one of our favorite Microsoft services is shutting down, we can at least take solace in the fact that Popfly users can download and play with their creations long after the Popfly service is shut down.